


Cats and Ducks

by CatLovePower



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen, Hurt Eliot Spencer, Hurt/Comfort, Tight Spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 15:30:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9826514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatLovePower/pseuds/CatLovePower
Summary: Eliot falls down a vent during a job. And then things get worse. And worse. And…





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story does not contain, in fact, any cats or ducks.

The job went from okay-ish to catastrophically bad in two seconds flat. That’s how long it takes to fall down a hole, apparently. One moment Eliot was on the roof, running after their mark's goon. The next, the ground disappeared beneath his feet and he fell without as much as a yelp.

The shaft was tight and dark, and during a panicky moment, he couldn’t tell which way was up. He must have banged his head when he toppled over, because there was a familiar ringing in his ears that said concussion. He blinked and tried to adjust to the dim light, feeling like a cat in the dark. Cats often died in chimneys, he once learned. They fell down, died and rotted away in the tight space. Not helping at all, he thought.

He tried to find purchase, but his feet couldn’t reach the floor, if there was any floor to reach. He was stuck, he realized; his broad shoulders prevented him from sliding further down the shaft. His right arm was tucked awkwardly along his body, and he couldn’t move it at all. His left was above his head, so he tried to feel his way around the trap. The walls were smooth, metallic, maybe ventilation.

He heard footsteps overhead at the same time Nate hailed him over the comm. He tried to control his breathing, make himself invisible. Nate was growing frantic in his ear, anxious about the job, afraid Eliot would ruin the whole thing because he vanished at a crucial moment.  "Not my fault," he wanted to say, but he didn't dare speak.

But the henchman spotted him nonetheless, suddenly blocking light when he bent over the hole, some ten feet up. Eliot couldn't really see his face, but he imagined the smug smile quite easily. He growled, frustrated and defiant.

“Look at you,” the goon said. “Not so scary now.”

The only warning Eliot got was the flash of a gun when the light reflected on the metal. He braced himself and put his free arm above his head, but there was nothing he could do. He tried to dislodge himself, but there was nowhere to go, and his struggles only made his enemy laugh.

Then bullets started raining down on him, and sparks flew everywhere when they ricocheted on the walls. The noise was making him even dizzier than before. Hardison was shouting something in his ear piece, so he guessed they caught some of that over the comms.

He felt a bullet pierce the flesh of his raised arm, but he was grateful that it wasn't his skull. The pain was inconsequent right now; it would be a problem later, when he'd need to run and fight. If he could get out of there. When he'd get out, he mentally corrected.

*

White hot pain pulsed along his left temple, and he realized the firing had stopped, and everything was silent. No, not completely. There was a high pitched whine in his ear, and buzzing in his head.

He could see the sky overhead, the opening of the shaft so close yet out of reach. His head and his arm pulsed in rhythm with his heart. Racing. Alive. Pumping blood that was hopefully not leaking everywhere at the moment.

He couldn't really do anything about it anyway, but he tried to check what was wrong with him. Cataloguing injuries helped forget the pain, push everything aside to deal with it later.

Holey arm. Still mobile. Stuck arm. Not crushed, maybe fractured. Blood running in his eye. Ear still attached but throbbing. Did he get shot in the head? Maybe in the ear. That would explain why he couldn't hear anything except the annoying whine.

He exhaled and let the uninjured side of his head rest on the shaft wall. The henchman left him for dead. He just hoped the team didn't do the same.

*

He had drifted to sleep and when he opened his eyes again, he was cold, his teeth chattering. It was probably a good thing his bad arm was above his head, it probably kept him from bleeding too much.

He didn't really know how much time had passed since he fell, but the team must have regrouped outside the building by now.

His earbud was still whining painfully, and he was starting to believe there was something wrong with his ear too. Maybe, if he could switch the comm to the undamaged side of his head, he might be able to contact the team.

But was it really the right thing to do right now... He was reluctant to put them in danger, but he also knew Nate would need all the information he could get before deciding on a course of action. Eliot didn't like needing to be saved, but the situation seemed complicated enough to warrant a little call for help.

As it turned out, it was really hard to reach your left ear with your left arm, when you were shot and stuck in a tight space. But Eliot wasn't only brute force and crazy resilience; he was also flexible, and stubborn. He might have screamed a little between clenched teeth - relieved that he could vaguely hear his own panting and grunting, afraid he was making too much noise - but at last, his fingers brushed the delicate piece of equipment. He gripped it as if his life depended on it, and maybe it did.

Inserting it in his other ear proved easy enough. He just hoped the blood hadn't short-circuited it.

“Nate? Hardison?” he tried, unsure about the volume of his own voice.

There was still some sort of feedback, but he could hear past the whine, which was definitely coming from his ear then.

“ _Krrr._.. “

“Hardison?”

“... _can't... Where_...”

This was getting nowhere. Eliot sighed and rested his head on the shaft. It made a dull 'thunk' and it gave him an idea.

Using his free hand, he tapped lightly on the small earbud, following a slow rhythm and a familiar pattern. Parker knew Morse code, he was sure of that. He didn't know about the others, but he trusted them to figure it out.

A lot of silence followed his message, so he repeated it a few times, and then waited for an answer. The earbud cracked and fizzled but there was no message for him to decode. It was worth trying anyway. Apparently it was up to him to get himself out of this mess.

He hadn't bled enough to slicken anything. Blood was useful when you were handcuffed, but not so much when your whole body was trapped. His chest was starting to feel tight, and when he closed his eyes for a second, he was rewarded with a flashback of Romania, circa 2004. Angry mobsters he had double crossed, a trunk, and a hole in a field. Not a good memory.

He forced his breathing to slow down, watching as his breath made little white clouds in front of his face. It was getting really cold, which was not a good thing, even if he survived worse conditions for longer. What time was it anyway? His watch was on his trapped wrist. The sun was setting. He must have remained unconscious longer than he thought.

*

In the team's hotel room, everyone was busy trying to figure out what to do. Hardison had set up his computers and was watching hours of surveillance feed for clues. Parker was fidgeting, coiling and untangling a length of rope. And Nate, Nate was scheming and drinking.

Strangely enough, no one was panicking. There was no time for that, and it was Eliot they were trying to rescue, the man was hard to kill or even slow down.

“What do you need?” Hardison asked when Parker finally looked ready for action.

“Blueprints. And a blowtorch. Lots of luck too.”

“On it.”

“We need to hurry up, Sophie is still in position at the reception,” Nate said, his voice even, but his hands shaking slightly.

“Huh-uh, Nate. From what I heard earlier, Eliot won't be in any position to provide protection, even if we get him out in time before they leave.” Hardison tried.

They all heard the brief exchange and the gunfire. But Eliot was still alive and kicking, sending Morse messages, over and over without acknowledging their response. That last part was a bit worrying, even though they were all hoping for a busted earbud, instead of a busted skull.

"I think," Nate said slowly, as if thinking aloud, "that maybe we could use that..."

"What? The fact that they left Eliot for dead?" Parker sounded outraged, and with good reason. Nate seemed unaffected by Eliot's current predicament; even though the state of the minibar told a different story.

"Precisely..." Nate said to no one in particular, lost in thoughts.

"The man is crazy..." Hardison muttered to himself, turning to his computer screen.

Eliot's message was scrambled but clear enough, and he had managed to get footage of the fall, the shooting, and the whole lot of nothing that followed.

Locating the vent had been easy enough. However, accessing the roof was now out of question, as it was guarded and watched. Parker was working on an alternative route.

*

Communication was still good, even from the entrails the ventilation system of the building. But Parker had fifteen floors to climb, from the inside, with a lot of gear, and without alerting any security, so after a while, Hardison stopped trying to hold a conversation, just like he stopped trying to raise Eliot a while back.

From time to time, he heard mumbled technical terms from his girl, and confused tapping from their hitter. Nate had left the room, and Sophie was still pretending to enjoy the company of arms dealers, posing as a client's broker. This job was a complete mess. And then it started raining.

*

Raindrops on his aching face roused him, and Eliot panicked for a brief second before remembering where he was. He tried to tap another message for the team but he couldn't feel his fingers anymore.

The rain could actually be useful, and he tried to forget the cold and the pain and focus on wiggling just enough to... To do what? Who was he kidding, there was no way he'd be able to climb the smooth vent all the way to the top. Not with an arm shot and the other broken. Not without some great incentive. He wondered if the team was alright.

The earbud had stopped crackling a while back, and he actually missed Hardison in his ear. He hadn't seen any more goons from their mark, no one had been sent to finish him off, and that was a good thing considering he was a sitting duck. He didn't know if ducks died in chimneys like cats did. Blood loss was making him woozy, he realized, but he had been in worse situations.

Chechnya, 2002. Three bullets in the back, courtesy of a private militia. But he had secured the plans he had been sent to retrieve, and he had ended up patching himself up in a hooker's bedroom, one with those overheard mirrors above the bed. It hadn’t been an easy task. The girl freaked out when he bled all over the sheets and sold him out to the bad guys. He had to jump through a window and ruined his stitches.

Eliot was aware that he was totally losing the point there, but he couldn’t really help it. Inaction didn’t suit him, and right now there wasn’t a lot he could do. He had a knife in his boot – and no way to get it. He had a team probably looking for him – and putting themselves at risk by doing so. He had… the water was pooling around his neck and he was uncomfortably wet now; how ironic would it be if he drowned right there?

He thought he heard a noise, but everything was muffled around him. A scraping sound, metal against metal. He stopped moving and tried to crane his neck to see the opening of the shaft. There wasn’t anyone visible from that angle, only the darkening sky and angry clouds pouring down on him. That sound again, coming from… somewhere below his feet, actually, and it was coming up.

He couldn’t see down there, couldn’t prepare for what was coming. He gave some tentative kicks, but didn’t hit anything – anyone. Then, another noise, even stranger, replaced the first mysterious ones. The plate next to his right shoulder grew hot; it was subtle at first, even pleasant. He tried to move away from it when it started burning, but the whooshing sound stopped, and the plate… the plate moved?

“Oh, Eliot…”

*

Parker wasn’t even sure she was blowtorching the right vent, on the right spot. There were no screams and she didn’t smell burnt flesh, so she figured she wasn’t burning Eliot. She had sounded the shaft, trying to figure out the hitter’s position, but it was guesswork at best.

So when she finally removed the panel and caught sight of a wet and bloody Eliot, she sighed in relief. He was hurt, but not by her at least. His eyes were glassy, but a look of recognition crossed his face, despite the darkness now that the night had fallen.

Parker held the torch in her mouth and tried to assess Eliot’s condition the best she could. Broken, wounded, too cold, still stuck. In her ear, Nate and Hardison sang an annoying duet, demanding updates with various degrees of urgency. She shushed them, the torch still in her mouth.

Sophie quietly reminded them of the time sensitive nature of their operation, and Parker just thought the plan was cruel. She didn’t doubt for an instant that Eliot would be up to the task, because he would do anything for Nate. But it didn’t sit right with her.

*

Nate had said not to lose any time, but Parker tied a bandana around Eliot’s left forearm, because the bullet wound was still bleeding sluggishly. His other arm was terribly bruised, yet a sling was out of the question. He’d have to wait until they were out of the ventilation system, until the job was over.

She didn’t have another earbud for him, and it wouldn’t have been useful anyway. Apparently being shot at in a closed space could damage your hearing, and after a failed tentative to communicate (deaf Eliot was way too loud), they resorted to pointing and nodding. Problem was, Parker had no way to explain that they were not escaping right away and possibly going to the hospital (unequal pupils were a bit of a concern at that point). She just hoped Eliot would roll with it and not pass out before they had all made their exit.

*

It turned out it was easy to make a scene when you launched a bleeding, confused and too loud Eliot in the middle of a dinner party. Diversion, chaos, call it whatever you wanted. When all the bodyguards turned their attention to the hitter who came back from the dead, Sophie was able to pickpocket their mark and get away. Then Hardison remotely triggered the fire alarm of the hotel, adding panic and stampede to the equation.

Parker loved every second of it.

*

They decided against going to the hospital; it would have raised too many questions, and Eliot was too combative to be dying yet. He kept growling and yelling that he couldn’t hear. It would have been comical, if it wasn’t the result of a bad concussion. The human brain tended to react poorly when a bullet grazed your skull.

Parker called in a favor from a strange guy who was a doctor like Hardison was a lawyer. But he was efficient, and managed to subdue Eliot with an injection. The hitter went down like a sack of potatoes, and the not-doctor stitched and bandaged and made sure nothing was permanently damaged.

*

When Eliot came round, he was sitting on the couch, stuck between Parker and Hardison. He could smell popcorn and antiseptic. His body felt heavy and unresponsive, his thoughts foggy. So they had drugged him; and the worst part was that he wasn’t even mad. Apparently they were watching a Star Wars movie – don’t ask him which one – with the TV on mute.

He was sick and tired and hurting. Stuck tight like before, but the sensation was different. He didn’t feel trapped and he knew that he could (probably) get up and away if he chose to. So he was okay with it.

*

“Do ducks die in chimneys, like cats?” Eliot suddenly asked in a weird, concerned tone. He raised his head slightly from Parker’s shoulder.

“What is he on about?” Hardison exclaimed.

“I’m on painkillers,” Eliot chuckled.

It was weird seeing him like that. However, Parker seemed to consider the question with a serious frown.

“No,” she said. “But they can get stuck in drains,” she added as an afterthought.

It seemed to satisfy Eliot, because he laid his head back and closed his eyes again.


End file.
